Beth Massihttps://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi
Sharing the goodness...Tue, 11 Oct 2016 00:03:52 +0000en-UShourly1Ignite Trip Report–Atlanta GA, Sept 26-30https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/10/07/ignite-trip-report-atlanta-ga-sept-26-30/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/10/07/ignite-trip-report-atlanta-ga-sept-26-30/#commentsSat, 08 Oct 2016 02:33:40 +0000https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/?p=10775Read more]]>Last week was I was at the Ignite conference in Atlanta and I was responsible for running the Developer Tools track. Let me tell you it was a FUN and crazy week. Here’s a tip when you run a track (content or otherwise): Wear tennis shoes!

Break out Sessions – all on-demand

Our track consisted of 2 full pre-days, 25 breakouts, 6 theater sessions and 9 interactive labs. Most breakout rooms were filled to capacity and many people were turned away at the door and directed to overflow viewing areas. This is a testament to the popularity and relevance of the sessions and speakers. You can also head to ignite.microsoft.com to see all of the the 718 (!) sessions, but I thought I would make it easy on you and put all the dev track sessions here if you missed them. I bolded my favorites. :-) UPDATE 10/10: Check out the decks here.

What a week! If you didn’t hear, we released .NET Core 1.0 on Monday at Red Hat DevNation. .NET Core is a cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern web apps, microservices and libraries that run on Windows, Linux and Mac. Congrats to everyone who made the .NET Core 1.0 release possible! This is a huge milestone for .NET that will take the platform another 15 years into the future.

You can watch the keynote where Scott Hanselman gets on stage and shows off the release of .NET Core running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (he starts a little after an hour into it).

I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel and running a booth with some fantastic team members at Red Hat Dev Nation & Summit. I have to say that people were genuinely excited (and frankly shocked) that .NET Core was available to RHEL developers. We had tons of swag that ran out the first day and a lot of people coming by the Microsoft area in general to learn about all the announcements that were made. Here’s a recap.

Announcements

Announcing .NET Core 1.0 (made #1 on Hacker News!) – This release includes the .NET Core & ASP.NET Core runtime and libraries. We are also releasing Preview 2 of the corresponding tools and Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions. The Visual Studio team also released Visual Studio 2015 Update 3. You need that release to build .NET Core apps in Visual Studio.

Announcing ASP.NET Core 1.0 – This new release is one of the most significant architectural updates we’ve done to ASP.NET. As part of this release we are making ASP.NET leaner, more modular, cross-platform, and cloud optimized. ASP.NET Core is now available, and you can start using it today by downloading it here.

Announcing Entity Framework Core 1.0 – Entity Framework Core (EF Core) is a lightweight, extensible, and cross-platform version of Entity Framework. This coincides with the release of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.

Samsung joins the .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group – The Technical Steering Group was created to help open up how technical decisions are made in the .NET platform as well as keep everyone on the same page as to the direction of the combined projects that make up the core components of .NET. In April, Red Hat, Jet Brains and Unity were welcomed to the .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group. Monday we welcomed Samsung as they have contributed to our projects particularly in the area of ARM support.

Red Hat also announced that they are now actively supporting .NET Core 1.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, extending the benefits of .NET to the entire Red Hat ecosystem.

We also announced along with Red Hat and Codenvy that the language server protocol powering our Visual Studio Code editor, which supports over 100 programming languages, is now being adopted by tool creators and language providers across the industry. This means that any developer can have a consistent, productive editing experience for their favorite programming language on any tool – even if that tool isn’t Visual Studio Code.

As I mentioned above, the .NET Core release announcement made #1 on Hacker News and we had an incredible amount of traffic to the post. We also had a lot of conversations and congratulations on twitter. Follow @dotnet on twitter and check out the hashtags #dotnetcore, #aspnetcore.

It was truly a wonderful and welcoming experience being at a conference where you never thought you’d be representing Microsoft. It was different but familiar at the same time. This is an enterprise developer conference and they share the same struggles as Microsoft enterprise developers. Containerization, heterogeneous systems, microservices, and modern cloud application lifecycle management are definitely the same struggles I hear at our own conferences. The crowd was very much interested in our technologies like SQL and .NET running on Linux as they look to move to modern workloads.

Special thanks to Todd Mancini @ToddMancini and Harry Mower @harrymower for your hard work on DevNation and the great partnership.

Enjoy!

]]>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/07/01/red-hat-devnation-summit-trip-report-net-core-1-0-releases/feed/12Open Source Show and Tell (#OSSAT) 2016https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/04/26/open-source-show-and-tell-ossat-2016-2/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/04/26/open-source-show-and-tell-ossat-2016-2/#respondWed, 27 Apr 2016 00:45:12 +0000https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/?p=10685Read more]]>Friday afternoon was OSSAT at the the Microsoft Reactor. I had the pleasure of hosting it with the main organizer, Justin Johnson (@elof) from Keen.io. I met Justin at last year’s Open Source Show And Tell when he reached out to the .NET team and I came to speak about .NET open source. I was so impressed with the meetup, that I coaxed Justin to do it at the Reactor this time.

It was a ton of fun and a really good crowd. We had folks from GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Node.js Foundation, Heroku alumni and many more interesting people that came and discussed a variety of open source topics. We had four 20 minute keynotes and a bunch of 5 minute lightning talks people signed up for on the fly. I have to say, I really like this format because it gives everyone a chance to have a voice and share something in our open source world. And the Reactor space was perfect.

Then Francesc got up and gave us a history lesson on open source including how it was done with the first Xerox printer(!) and spoke to how open source has benefitted Google. Nadia had some interesting observations on GitHub repos and gave us some tips and tricks on writing contribution guidelines and running successful, inclusive, open source projects.

There were also a bunch of interesting lightning talks and great questions and discussions from the crowd, particularly on open source SLAs, open business models, open voting systems, open education, contributing to documentation and parsing SQL. A bunch of us also went out for beers afterwards where the real networking happened ;-). We did record the talks, we just have to get through the footage and post it somewhere. I’ll update this post when we get it all together.

I want to thank Justin for organizing this fantastic meetup. As a like minded community person, it was an honor helping out this time. If you’re looking to host your own OSSAT, check out Justin’s playbook: http://opensourceshowandtell.github.io/

Enjoy!

]]>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/04/26/open-source-show-and-tell-ossat-2016-2/feed/0Open Source Show and Tell (#OSSAT) 2016https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/04/26/open-source-show-and-tell-ossat-2016/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/04/26/open-source-show-and-tell-ossat-2016/#respondWed, 27 Apr 2016 00:40:36 +0000https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/?p=10675Read more]]>Friday afternoon was OSSAT at the the Microsoft Reactor. I had the pleasure of hosting it with the main organizer, Justin Johnson (@elof) from Keen.io. I met Justin at last year’s Open Source Show And Tell when he reached out to the .NET team and I came to speak about .NET open source. I was so impressed with the meetup, that I coaxed Justin to do it at the Reactor this time.

It was a ton of fun and a really good crowd. We had folks from GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Node.js Foundation, Heroku alumni and many more interesting people that came and discussed a variety of open source topics. We had four 20 minute keynotes and a bunch of 5 minute lightning talks people signed up for on the fly. I have to say, I really like this format because it gives everyone a chance to have a voice and share something in our open source world. And the Reactor space was perfect.

Then Francesc got up and gave us a history lesson on open source including how it was done with the first Xerox printer(!) and spoke to how open source has benefitted Google. Nadia had some interesting observations on GitHub repos and gave us some tips and tricks on writing contribution guidelines and running successful, inclusive, open source projects.

There were also a bunch of interesting lightning talks and great questions and discussions from the crowd, particularly on open source SLAs, open business models, open voting systems, open education, contributing to documentation and parsing SQL. A bunch of us also went out for beers afterwards where the real networking happened ;-). We did record the talks, we just have to get through the footage and post it somewhere. I’ll update this post when we get it all together.

I want to thank Justin for organizing this fantastic meetup. As a like minded community person, it was an honor helping out this time. If you’re looking to host your own OSSAT, check out Justin’s playbook: http://opensourceshowandtell.github.io/

Enjoy!

]]>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/04/26/open-source-show-and-tell-ossat-2016/feed/0.NET Goodness at BUILD 2016 – .NET ALL THE THINGS!https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/04/15/net-goodness-at-build-2016-net-all-the-things/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/04/15/net-goodness-at-build-2016-net-all-the-things/#commentsFri, 15 Apr 2016 14:35:00 +0000https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/?p=10605Read more]]>BUILD 2016 was two weeks ago in my favorite city, San Francisco. There was a TON of .NET content & announcements delivered. Here’s a recap of all the big .NET sessions, announcements, downloads and resources. And my apologies for not getting this out sooner, but I was unexpectedly out last week. Plus, anyone trying to pay attention to all the stuff happening that week probably needed a little break anyways ;-)

It’s never been a better time to be a .NET Developer! You can use .NET to literally build any app for any device.

.NET sessions

BUILD wouldn’t be BUILD without all the fantastic .NET speakers presenting. Seriously, more .NET sessions reigned in the top 10 than any other topic. Check out all the .NET sessions here with this handy link: https://aka.ms/BuildDotNet

I’d recommend starting with the .NET Overview with Scott Hunter and Scott Hanselman. This starts out with a good high-level overview of the .NET implementations, including Xamarin, and how we want to eventually get to a .NET Standard Library.

.NET for the locals

With the huge help of the local developer relations team, we put on another great local community event sponsored by the .NET Foundation and GitHub. Hosted at the Microsoft Reactor, called Open Night @ the Reactor. The event was designed to educate and energize the open source community, highlight community influencers, and showcase how Microsoft supports the local developer ecosystem. We also made a Friday pass to the BUILD Hub/Expo available to anyone that wanted one.

We had over 130 people in attendance and included lightning talks from Jono Bacon from GitHub, Shaun Walker from the .NET Foundation, Alice Deng and Eva Zheng from the student developer community (organizers of Calhacks – UC Berkeley annual hackathon), and Ryan Boyd from Neo4j.

I did a quick introduction that started off with a short story of how I am a Bay Area native who graduated from Cal State East Bay (called Hayward back then – I guess no one knows where Hayward is ;-)). I couldn’t have had a successful career without the developer community and attending then eventually speaking at user groups. Spaces like the Reactor are invaluable to the community.

What about Beth?

So, what the heck have I been up to!? It’s been a couple months since I moved to marketing and I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. BUT, I did have a fantastically busy and rewarding time preparing and executing for BUILD. Here’s a couple accomplishments that you might have noticed:

Give some love to the marketing website!

We got www.microsoft.com/net website updated. If you ever were there previously, I’m sorry! Now we have a modern, responsive design, and better explanations of .NET Framework & .NET Core. It’s a work in progress but it’s a good start.

I also did a Channel 9 Live session with Scott Hunter and Rich Lander on .NET Core the last day of BUILD. Here I talk a little bit about what I’m doing now and why I’m so excited about .NET now and into the future.

dotnetConf Virtual Conference June 7-9

Last but not least, we’ve started planning the next dotnetConf! You should see the www.dotnetconf.net website updated with the June 7-9 dates. Are you ready to rediscover .NET? Immerse yourself in the world of .NET and join our live stream for 3 days of free online content June 7 – 9 featuring speakers from the .NET Community and Microsoft product teams. The live stream will be broadcasted on https://channel9.msdn.com.

Learn to develop for web, mobile, desktop, games, services, libraries and more for a variety of platforms and devices all with .NET! We’ll have presentations on .NET Core and ASP.NET Core, C#, F#, Roslyn, Visual Studio, Xamarin, and much more.

Let us know you’re interested, sign up at www.dotnetconf.net, and we’ll keep you posted when the agenda goes live.

WHEW! That’s a lot. I’ll try not to be so much of a stranger here on this blog. Until next time.

Enjoy!

]]>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/04/15/net-goodness-at-build-2016-net-all-the-things/feed/5My Next Adventurehttps://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/01/18/my-next-adventure/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/01/18/my-next-adventure/#commentsMon, 18 Jan 2016 10:52:09 +0000https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/01/18/my-next-adventure/Read more]]>After 8 years in Visual Studio engineering helping .NET developers build awesome software and learn from each other, I’ve decided to take a new role at Microsoft as Product Marketing Manager for .NET. I feel like this will be a huge challenge for me as a long time developer but a great opportunity to grow my career. Yes, I’m going to marketing. But I’ll still be working on my most loved platform that has really defined my career, .NET.

I love .NET so why not jump at the opportunity to get the world even more excited about it from a different perspective? As a community champion for .NET developers, this new role is more of an evolution of all the things I’ve been doing all along. Instead of me running around the world speaking, or writing, or doing videos, I’m going to enable others to be great. I’m going to scale. I’m going to be behind the scenes instead of the spotlight.

Thank you to all the amazing .NET developers out there who have loyally read this blog over the years. From language tips, to data and services, to Office development, to desktop to mobile to cloud. .NET has been there though it all. Now we’re on the verge of something really amazing. Something I never thought would happen. .NET on other OS platforms besides Windows. So many more developers! And development in the open has really transformed our engineering team into “community developers”. They aren’t just engineers but also social engineers. I’m so proud.

It’s time to try something new but still be close to developers and the platform I fell in love with 15 years ago. I honestly have no idea what I’m doing yet! I have a lot to learn for sure. But luckily I’m joining a fantastic developer marketing team that really knows their stuff.

Wish me luck!

]]>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2016/01/18/my-next-adventure/feed/34GitHub Universe & SVCC Trip Reportshttps://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/10/07/github-universe-svcc-trip-reports/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/10/07/github-universe-svcc-trip-reports/#commentsWed, 07 Oct 2015 15:42:07 +0000https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/10/07/github-universe-svcc-trip-reports/Read more]]>Last weekend I had the opportunity to (wo)man the Microsoft booth at GitHub Universe as well as speak at the largest code camp in North America, Silicon Valley Code Camp. Both were great experiences in very different ways.

TL;DR;

GitHub Universe felt like a rave. The industrial space catered very well to the demographic.

GitHub gave Microsoft some really nice placement and a large lounge area (with power) that had a good flow of traffic.

As I was projecting this (and selected Linux) a dude with dreadlocks looked up and yelled “.NET is cross-platform!? WTF!?”

People seemed genuinely interested in the why we’re open sourcing .NET. I wasn’t trying to sell .NET, I was showing how we’re working in the open on a cross-platform .NET and that seemed to resonate. Maybe they’ll take a look. :-)

The more I talk with developers on other stacks, the more I realize we all have the same struggles with the whole development process, we just have different solutions.

Current .NET devs are hungry for .NET Core & ASP.NET 5 content and are looking for migration guidance.

FIRST, THE VENUE. This was one of the strangest venues I think I have been to in a long time. Held at Pier 70 in San Francisco, it’s not a bad part of town but it’s not a good one either. I have not been down here since my 20s when I used to go to raves, seriously. To get there I took BART to Embarcadero and then the Muni T-line past AT&T park to 20th. I get off and start walking toward the piers through the very under construction warehouses and roads. Both sidewalks are closed so I’m trying to stay as close to the fence as possible so not to get run over by heavy machinery. I’m starting to worry I’m heading the wrong way when I see a “GitHub Universe this way” sign. WHEW. So I keep walking. And walking. This is weird, I’m just seeing more and more run-down warehouses. Then I spot someone, no two, big dudes in black suits with walkie-talkies. Oh good, I found the bouncers. Where the hell am I? I hope the DJ is good.

When I get to the front entrance it’s a huge industrial warehouse like all the rest I’ve seen, but it’s transformed into a really awesome display. It catered to the demographic very well. Outside they have bike storage along with the coat check. They have wedding-style tents for the catering with a nice outdoor patio. The bathrooms were nice motorhome-style trailers. I register and get a really cool wooden badge. Neat! The keynote is going on in a large space and breakouts (3 or 4) are held in adjacent rooms. I’d say there were about 1000 people here. Predominantly young men, but there were a good amount of women and 40-somthings there as well.

THE MICROSOFT “BOOTH”: We didn’t have a booth per-se, we had a huge space with chairs, couches and power tables. We had a few banners with some of Microsoft’s open source repos listed (yes corefx, coreclr and Roslyn were all there). We had one large demo TV screen. When I arrived we had the Microsoft logo on the screen because it wasn’t really apparent that the space was sponsored by us. Of course, I did plenty of demos as the day went on. The great thing about the space was it was really big and there was plenty of people sucking power from the tables between sessions so we had a pretty good flow of traffic. I didn’t notice any other vendors there in the area so I think we had some really nice treatment from GitHub.

INTERACTIONS: We didn’t have any set scripts or demos, so I often projected our .NET core site http://dotnet.github.io/core and flipped through our repos, showing GitHub :heart: Microsoft and vice versa. Then I started playing with some core console apps and VS Code, deployed to a Linux VM, ran some hello worlds. Jeremy Foster (your local Pac Northwest Developer Evangelist – get to know him!), was showing off some really cool stuff as well like this thing that visualizes package stores, including NuGet, into a mini universe. People would look up from their Macs and stare once in a while, stop talking and smile sometimes. As I was projecting this (and selected Linux) a dude with dreadlocks looked up and yelled “.NET is cross-platform!? WTF!?”. He said the words not the abbreviation J as he almost fell off his chair. At this point a couple people came up and wanted a demo, and the hello world started over. That was fun. People seemed genuinely interested in the why we’re doing this. I wasn’t trying to sell .NET in any way, I was showing how we’re working in the open on a cross-plat .NET and that seemed to resonate. It was really a no-pressure, cool vibe going on all day.

CONVERSATIONS:

OH:

“.NET is cross-platform and open source? WTF?!”

“Does Windows Server support package managers yet? I went to Linux because it was so easy to install and manage.”

“Is that the new Edge browser? It looks pretty cool.”

“I’m looking at Azure but I need to store really large music and video files, which storage options are available?”

“Is that Windows 10? What does the start menu look like?”

I met a lot of great developers from Dropbox, GitHub, InterWorks, and many small startups doing all sorts of great things and even chartable causes. I met a 25-year old teacher from Ghana that was teaching JavaScript programming, business and marketing there. You could tell he really loved what he was doing there. I met many different developers working on many different technologies. It was great exposure to the wide world of open source. Mike Bartlett, a PM on Gitter, also came up to thank the .NET team for embracing open source and GitHub. He even asked me for feedback to improve Gitter!

I also met Matthew Reily, a .NET developer who came up to me and asked for a picture. Not only is he a .NET developer, he’s also runs a .NET User Group in Oklahoma so we chatted for a while about community. He asked how he could help us. I showed him how to get started with our repos, our contribution guides, as well as gave him my content from my SVCC talk on Intro to .NET Core so he could spread the love. THANKS MATT!

Silicon Valley Code Camp

Silicon Valley Code Camp is the largest code camp in North America typically drawing 3000 attendees. It’s celebrating its 10th year – I have spoken at 9 of them. This year SVCC took place at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose. A new venue and it was awesome. Peter Kellner, head organizer and ASP.NET MVP, landed on the Channel 2 news for the first time! I could tell he was really excited. No, really, that’s Peter REALLY excited. :-)

There are a lot great sessions taught by experts in the community on a variety of subjects and technologies. This year we also had 4 tracks with heavy Microsoft technology influence. It was great to see a lot of Microsoft technologies here this year and the local MS developer relations team, led by Joe Shirey, were all there presenting sessions as well. We also had a large booth with Surface’s, tons of book giveaways and lots of .NET stickers from yours truly and the .NET Foundation.

I zipped in and out on Sunday for my 10:45AM session: Introduction to .NET Core and ASP.NET 5. The room was full, probably held about 60 people so there was definite interest in this topic which was great. When I asked who were .NET developers, everyone but one person raised their hand (he was an Android/Java developer). So I geared the talk appropriately. Most of the session is me on the command line and in VS Code, but I did show Visual Studio the last 15 minutes or so. What really resonated for this audience were a couple of things:

Explaining the “magic” behind Visual Studio: Show the command line steps to build a simple hello world

Take some time to explain package managers, project.json, dnu restore, and the deployment options. No GAC & app local deploy was welcomed

Take time to explain the ASP.NET in-memory compilation where we’re not building to disk anymore so you can edit C# code, save, and just refresh the browser

Build an app on Windows and deploy it to Linux. This got applause. We’re opening a lot of doors for folks.

Explain that we’re trying to build an open ecosystem for .NET and support the community for building libraries and components that fill gaps. This is the mission of the .NET Foundation.

Afterwards I did have a couple questions on how to approach a migration from webforms app to ASP.NET 5 as well as their libraries. Migration guidance is important, particularly for porting libraries to core. We’ll get there as we build out our documentation as we head to release. Remember we’re still building this thing! :-) I will be happy to take this show on the road and expand upon the basics of ASP.NET 5 development for the new developers and our current ones.

It’s great to see a lot of Microsoft technologies here this year and the local MS developer relations team will all be here presenting sessions as well. I’ll be delivering this session in the Web Development track:

Introduction to .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 (10:45 AM Sunday October 4th) ASP.NET 5 is a completely new Web framework for building modern, cloud-based Web applications that run on the cross-platform .NET Core. In this presentation I will introduce you to .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 and the latest features and innovations. For the first time every ASP.NET 5 app is supported on Windows, OS X and Linux by way of the new cross-platform .NET Core. Visual Studio 2015 also adds support for ASP.NET 5 with an agile cross-platform tooling experience. Come learn about the latest groundbreaking changes in .NET Core and ASP.NET 5!

Those of you who know me know that I don’t come from a web development background. My areas of focus were always desktop, data and Office development. I’m not ashamed to admit it (that much). But since I’ve been on the .NET core & languages team for a couple years, I have been exposed to ASP.NET 5 a ton as the team has been building it out in the open for a while now, along with our compilers and .NET Core. What’s cool, is that I’m starting from almost the beginning with an all new, powerful, cross-platform web stack. I should be able to deliver a good intro session for ASP.NET 5 beginners since I am one too! I will post all the demos and resources afterwards here.

BTW, if you’re not able to make it next weekend, you can check out this session at South Bay.NET tonight!

]]>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/09/24/silicon-valley-code-camp-next-weekend-intro-to-net-core-asp-net-5/feed/0Visual Studio 2015 and .NET Framework 4.6 released today–behind the scenes goodies, t-shirts, and lots of open developmenthttps://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/07/20/visual-studio-2015-and-net-framework-4-6-released-today-behind-the-scenes-goodies-t-shirts-and-lots-of-open-development/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/07/20/visual-studio-2015-and-net-framework-4-6-released-today-behind-the-scenes-goodies-t-shirts-and-lots-of-open-development/#commentsMon, 20 Jul 2015 19:50:48 +0000https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/07/20/visual-studio-2015-and-net-framework-4-6-released-today-behind-the-scenes-goodies-t-shirts-and-lots-of-open-development/Read more]]>You probably heard that Visual Studio 2015 and .NET Framework 4.6 released today. Congrats team! This is a big day for us as we’ve all been working really hard on this release for many many months. Get the bits now!

I had the pleasure of showing off the awesome productivity, debugging and diagnostic tools kicking off the launch keynote with Soma. That was pretty darn fun. I personally thought I was wearing too much makeup but that’s what studio people make you do ;-). Amanda Silver and Scott Hanselman also joined Soma on stage to show off a slew of mobile and web development tools. Scott also touched on new features in C#, ASP.NET 5 and .NET Core which is our open source & cross-platform stack. If you missed it, definitely check it out.

I have to say that this was one of my favorite Visual Studio launches ever – and I’ve been using Visual Studio for a very long time. What was really special about it IMO was we really showed our customers how we’ve embraced open source and open development. It’s been a big culture change for us and we’re excited for the future. It’s a great time to be a developer! Watch this short video on how we build Visual Studio, many parts out in the open. I am so proud to be on this team.

And thanks for all the encouraging comments on twitter! Sometimes, while I’m battling my nerves and trying to remember all the right keystrokes on stage, I forget how I may be inspiring other developers, especially young women developers, to do their best work. It’s humbling to say the least.

Oh and all of you asking for my .NET T-shirt, you can grab the artwork from the .NET Foundation SWAG repo as well as order stickers from sticker mule. And if you have more artistic ability than your average developer like me, submit a pull request and we’ll get you onto your own stickers too! (T-shirts coming soon. UPDATE 7/22: Order T-shirts here! http://dotnet.spreadshirt.com/).

It’s a big day for us on the Visual Studio team. Thank you all for your support and for being awesome developers!

Enjoy!

]]>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/07/20/visual-studio-2015-and-net-framework-4-6-released-today-behind-the-scenes-goodies-t-shirts-and-lots-of-open-development/feed/18Trip Report: //BUILD and Ignite Conferenceshttps://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/05/15/trip-report-build-and-ignite-conferences/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/05/15/trip-report-build-and-ignite-conferences/#commentsFri, 15 May 2015 17:26:03 +0000https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bethmassi/2015/05/15/trip-report-build-and-ignite-conferences/Read more]]>Wow, what a busy last few weeks (months for many of us) as we prepped and delivered a couple huge events with BUILD and Ignite. I had the pleasure of being involved with the planning around our .NET content and community event at BUILD and I also got to get up on stage with my manager for the first time and deliver a foundational (read: Overview/What’s New) session at Ignite.

I thought I’d write up my thoughts on my experience at both conferences as well as point out some of my favorite sessions and helpful links along the way.

//BUILD

There were a lot of great announcements, downloads, and more OSS goodness at //BUILD this year. Like:

I noticed attendees were excited about the direction of .NET and being open source and were generally familiar with our prior announcements and posts on the .NET Team Blog. They were looking at the next level: how the projects were coming along and how to get involved. Common questions I got were…

What is the .NET Foundation? – We’re here to foster an open ecosystem around .NET by providing legal protection, infrastructure, community support, mentorship and visibility. We want our projects to focus on building amazing things and not the paperwork and infrastructure needed to support OSS projects. Check out our website at www.dotnetfoundation.org and join us in the forums.

I also got to do a Channel 9 “Live” interview on the .NET Foundation. I’ve done so many recording where I’m the interviewer, it was fun being the interviewee this time. VERY classy, professional production. And Seth Juarez, the new Channel 9 host, was AWESOME. I was up there with Jay Schmelzer, Immo Landwerth and Martin Woodward (also on the .NET Team with me). Jay is also the President of the .NET Foundation, Immo is on the Advisory Council and project lead for CoreFx and Martin is the Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. I’m officially the “secretary” but I rather call myself the Technical Evangelist :-).

“After Hours” Community Event

The goal of this event was to speak to the local community as an evening (i.e. after work) free user group presentation & social event, utilizing speakers & experts that were at BUILD. We partnered with the local field evangelism team that helped book an amazing venue. Our message centered on .NET innovations + cross-plat + OSS to educate and energize the local community about .NET and the .NET Foundation.

Scott and Damian were awesome as always and showed us how to get started with ASP.NET 5 and .NET Core running on Linux. Then they fielded questions for about 20 minutes. Immo and Phil took time to show us how the .NET team is working (successfully) with the community on GitHub. Geoff Norton, our top community contributor, was also really awesome, telling a good, honest story and is a super likable guy. On behalf of the entire team, Immo and Phil thanked him for his amazing contributions.

My personal favorite speaker was Chris Wanstrath CEO of GitHub. He delivered a motivational speech to all those people that were “afraid” of contributing to OSS. He said we’ve all been there, afraid of what people will think of your first contribution, it’s tough out there. It’s our jobs to change that. That really resonated with me.

Ignite

Let me first say that Chicago is my kind of town, baby! We had pretty great weather and I made it out to a Sox game which was fantastic (Cubs were on the road, but I did ride a bike by Wrigley field). Of the 23,000 people there (wow), about 15% were developers.

.NET OSS & Cross-platform support also had a huge interest here and I did a lot of pointing people to our repos. Even VB developers I spoke with were excited to learn that the future of VB.NET is being planned out in the open on the Roslyn repo, and of course I encourage all the VB devs out there to get involved. Please! :-)

Jay and I made a great team on stage. Demos resonated with people and we got great attendance (almost 600 people) and great comments (which is a relief because Jay was reading them too ;)). This was a whirlwind tour of a ton of stuff in on the Microsoft stack, .NET, Visual Studio, including modern mobile and web development across platforms.